Social media widgets and Facebook

Wikipedians are in another spat, over the usefulness of the term "social media."

Here was Wikipedia’s entry before it was emasculated to its current entry:

Social media describes the online tools and platforms
that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and
perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different
forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums
include blogs,message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs.

Tina
Sharkey (co-founder of iVillage, former SVP of AIM and Social Media,
and now head of BabyCenter.com) first came up with the term "social
media" as a form of community-driven Internet content in 1997 and
registered the domain "socialmedia.com" shortly thereafter. Later,
Chris Shipley (Co-founder and Global Research Director for Guidewire
Group) helped popularize the term "social media." The BlogOn 2004
conference, July 22-23, 2004, focused on the "business of social
media." Shipley and Guidewire Group used the term "social media" in the
months leading up to that event to discuss the coming together of
blogging, wikis, social networks, and related technologies into a new
form of participatory media.

I launched SocialMedia.biz at that 2004 BlogOn conference. But kudos for the term should go to Tina Sharkey, whom I met a couple of times when she was a VP at AOL and who recently took over the editorial reins at BabyCenter — as it happens, a position I once held.

A couple of days ago I had an interesting call with Dennis Yu, the chief data cruncher for SocialMedia.com, which obtained the url from Tina and launched a business around it. Dennis and co. are doing some great work by connecting widget developers with marketers and posting the applications on Facebook. You’ll recall that on May 24 Facebook launched Facebook Platform, a site that supports Web developers’ efforts to create third-party apps for Facebook members. Now there are hundreds of Facebook applications, with more going live every day.

SocialMedia.com is keeping a running tally of the "total number of apps installed" on Facebook: 12.8 million as of today. That refers not to the number of applications,  but to the number of users who installed the widgets to run on their Facebook pages or blogs. This is one of those areas where social media and social networking directly intersect.

Among the most popular Facebook apps that SocialMedia.com created or promoted are Happy Hour!, Food Fight!, My Aquarium and Harry Potter Magic Spells. You have to log into Facebook to access these widgets. I’m still experimenting with widgets on Facebook so I’m adding a lot that I may or may not use. But I’m impressed with their breadth and variety and with the loyalty of their users.

"Applications are just exploding. The volume on our surveys is just crazy," Yu told me. "We’re finding that they monetize better than ads." The company solicits marketing data through surveys and contests, sometimes by offering virtual money in widgets like Food Fight. Hey, it works.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.